Preacher: The Rev. Deacon Pam Bright
As most of you may know, my day job is serving as Social Work Program Manager for Child Protective Services at the Department of Social Services here in Cleveland County. I have also supervised foster care at different points in my career, so I have had the joy of helping adoptions happen.
What you may not know is I have personal knowledge of the power of adoption; my father was adopted when he was 7 years old.
My dad was the second oldest in a family of five. When he was 6, his mother died from pneumonia shortly after giving birth to her youngest, the only girl, whom she named Lucille. My grandfather, known for being an alcoholic and a batterer, was serving an extended jail sentence at the time.
This happened during the Depression, and none of the relatives could afford to take all five in, so they split the children up among themselves, some going to members of the Bright clan, others to the Peaces, my grandmother’s side of the family.
Being good folks I suppose, they all took the children to see their father in jail on a Sunday afternoon after church. My grandfather told the family that he would see the children “dead and in hell” before he would let them raise them, and subsequently signed them over to a state orphanage.
The oldest, my uncle James, ran away, and the youngest three, Pierce, Ernest and Lucille, who were 3, 2 and a newborn, were quickly adopted, leaving my father there alone without his siblings.
Daddy said he played everyday on the split rail fence along the road in front of the orphanage, and many days, a peach farmer named Andrew MacAbee would stop and talk to him on the way to take produce and other wares to market. One day, Mr. MacAbee told my father he had been talking to his wife about him and he asked my father if he wanted to go home with him and be their little boy. Daddy agreed to his offer, with one stipulation - he asked that they not change his name, in case his brothers ever tried to find him. The MacAbees agreed, and my father soon had a new home with them.
Pentecost and adoption? Yes-the very heart of the Pentecost story is our adoption as children of God.
On Pentecost, we focus on the Holy Spirit, and we are used to talking about the Holy Spirit in spectacular and extraordinary ways, such as we hear about today in our reading from Acts: the sound of a mighty, rushing wind; tongues, like fire descending, or as we hear about in Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit descending like a dove, accompanied by a voice from heaven.
Those are powerful stories, critically important stories that help us understand some of the ways God works in the world. But it seems equally important to talk about how, through the Spirit of God, we are included in God’s family.
Consider, for a minute, our epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
“All who are led by the Spirit are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry “Abba, Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ-if, in fact we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him.”
So today, on Pentecost, as we remember and celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to those first believers, we are also celebrating our adoption as children of God through the gift of the Spirit dwelling within us. The Spirit makes us children of God and so connects us with God that we can approach God as a parent, crying out to God as a child would to their father or mother.
And notice in our reading from Acts what Luke doesn’t say about the wind-or the tongues of fire-or the indwelling of the Spirit-or the proclamation of the Good News in different languages. He never mentions any kind of exclusion. God called them all, all of them, as God still calls us all-into God’s kingdom, into God’s family. The differences in culture and language and ethnicity and gender and theology and education and economic status that separated one person from another crumbled, broken apart by the power of the wind and the Gospel and the Spirit.
In his article Adoption as God’s Children Andrew Marr says “...God is the most prodigal of adoptive parents there is. God just doesn’t just adopt a child here and another child there. God adopts everybody. We are, all of us, adopted children of God. God chooses us. The emphasis is on intentionality. God’s love for us is not some vague instinct that happens automatically... Rather, God invites each and every one of us individually to become God’s chosen child because God has already chosen us.”
My father had a stipulation on being adopted, but he said yes to the MacAbees. He was no longer an orphan. With his yes came the joys and as well as the responsibilities of being part of a family-meeting his new siblings, learning their rules and customs, helping to do the things that needed done to keep the family together. My father was influenced and shaped and loved by my Grandma and Grandpa MacAbee.
As children of God, the Spirit of God dwells within us, is alive within us. We are led, we are influenced, we are shaped, we are changed and loved by that Spirit if we allow it, if we say yes, if we allow the Spirit to fill us and work in and through us.
Remember what that same Spirit did on that first Christian Pentecost.
That was the day when the timid and afraid - think Peter here - became bold and courageous...
The day when looking inward became far less important than looking outward...
The day when concern for one’s self was replaced with an overwhelming passion and desire to tell others how they might find healing and salvation, health and wholeness in and through Jesus Christ...
That same amazing powerful Spirit that dwells in each of us; the question becomes what are we doing about it? Are we being true to the Spirit we have been given as children of God? Are we saying yes, are we allowing ourselves to be lead by the Spirit?
Some contemporary theologians were asked to blog about how the Holy Spirit moves today, how is the Holy Spirit at work in the world today, in 100 words or less. Monica A. Coleman, professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions at Claremont School of Theology responded with the following:
“when we put the gospel
to hip hop
and host U2charists,
when we share the church building
with the Korean congregation,
when we preach against homophobia
when we break bread
with jews and muslims
when the teenagers lead worship
on a regular Sunday (not just youth day)
when we invoke the ancestors
and learn from their lives,
when we live at the borders
offering water to those in the desert
harbor to those in danger
and community when we don’t fit in...
it is then that we speak in tongues.”
May we indeed speak in tongues...may we say yes to God, and may the fire and the wind that changed the first followers and made them and all who come after the children of God transform us so that our lives reflect just whose children we are.
Amen.
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